After several dry winters in Israel, the earth in the old Roman cemetery in Beit She’an, near the Sea of Galilee, was dusty and loose. So this year’s rains washed some of that earth away, and the sculptures were noticed by a passerby. — Haaretz (Israel)

“The Catcher in the Rye” was not originally marketed as a book for teens, but they responded to it as their anthem: More than 65 million copies have been sold. I suspect, though, that the novel wouldn’t be such a phenomenon if it debuted today. – Washington Post

Yes – this is on a Reddit forum, a site not known for its calm discussion of issues. But the Change My View forum, “founded in 2013 by Kal Turnbull, then a teenage musician in Scotland, is an online space that promotes respectful conversation between people who disagree with each other.” – The Atlantic

Manohla Dargis: It’s not that I’m noticing sexism more; I always noticed. It’s that I’m not gliding over the insults and insinuations, the snickering and unmotivated female nudity as easily — as resignedly — as I sometimes did. Years ago, I thought that accepting a certain amount of sexism in movies was the only way I was going to be able to continue loving them.” – The New York Times

Fifteen years ago, Jenna Freedman “established the zine library at Manhattan’s Barnard College, where she is still zine librarian. Today, the collection consists of over 10,000 zines and focuses heavily on material created by marginalized communities, with topics as varied as mothers and daughters documenting holidays together to searing political collections about racism in punk rock.” – BuzzFeed

Everyone’s talking about the new Black Mirror movie, Bandersnatch, partly because it’s a choose your own adventure movie – but how does that work, with Netflix? Whew: The network created an entirely new software called Branch Manager. “The final product — which looks like islands of flowcharts that branch out to include series of if-then options — creates an infinite number of variations to the story because of the ‘state tracking’ technology that tracks viewer choices as the experience progresses.” – The Hollywood Reporter

“Along with his contemporaries Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, Sen was part of a troika of directors from the Eastern Indian state of Bengal that put Indian cinema on the global stage. During a tumultuous time in Bengal politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Sen and Ray both made Calcutta trilogies, with Sen choosing to be overtly political.” – Variety

Lighting designer Paule Constable sums it all up: “Theatre isn’t entertainment alone – it needs to challenge, to bring together, to reflect. There are so many complex issues to grapple with at the moment: diversity, sustainability, Brexit, pressure on resources, gender, representation. We need art to help us to think – to work out a way forward.” –The Stage (UK)

“Rembrandt was 28 when he married Saskia in 1634; 36 when she died, leaving him with a baby son and a sorrow so destructive he gave up painting in oils for several years. The measure of his loss is apparent, too, in the nature of these images of Saskia and their happiness, made before (and in one case after) her death. Here is the artist’s heart.” – The Observer (UK)